Archive for February, 2015

But, like…I do also try to think critically about the erotica I enjoy as well?

Like, Beauty’s Release is suuuper Orientalist and racist and messed up. (To be fair, I didn’t enjoy Beauty’s Release that much, I like my porn with less unrealistically violent anal fisting…but I did like the first two Sleeping Beauty books, so if we’re going to talk about the trilogy as a whole we have to talk about how the third book is really, really racist.)

Exit to Eden had a chapter that actually moved me to tears the first time I read it, but the rest of it is really boring and poorly written, in the most Anne-Rice-y way possible. And the possible reading of it where Lisa is freaking out about possibly falling in love becauseDommes don’t fall in love or whatever is pretty messed up.

Carrie’s Story and Safe Word are massively lacking in any sort of communication around consent or limits. Like, the second book is freaking called Safe Word, but nowhere in either is consent discussed at any length. (SPOILER ALERT) Carrie’s “safeword” in the second book is to GTFO. That’s not what that term is supposed to mean…

And, like, have you read The Story of O? Do you want to talk about unrealistic portrayals of BDSM? O gets whipped to unconsciousness multiple times, gets strike-branded, and gets a wildly unrealistic genital piercing. And that’s only the physical stuff. I can’t really even touch the emotional stuff without making myself really uncomfortable.

And also you can have fantasies about things that would be incredibly terrible IRL, and that’s okay, but it’s definitely not a bad thing to take a look at said fantasies and have a conversation about why elements of them would never (and should never) work in real life. And honestly, it’s something I sometimes struggle with. I’m not always awesome about drawing a clear line between fantasy and reality, so I, like, extra double-plus need to have these conversations because they’re helpful to me as a partner, a submissive, and as a human.

(Of course, none of the above have caused a merchandise empire where people aresticking bumpersstickers with quotes from the book on their car and dressing their babies int-shirts that say “My mommy wishes my daddy were Sir Stephen.”)